[trowawee]

The firehose issue is definitely a problem with RSS, especially if all you've ever experienced is algorithmic social media feeds. It's solveable, but it does require either a very specific approach (I quickly scan my unreads in Feedbin/Reeder, save whatever I want to read in depth, and then browse saved items later), or a reasonably large suite of rules applied to your feed (takes a long time to build, takes even longer to refine, and you will find yourself perpetually tuning them), or something like Feedly's AI assistant (but then you're still outsourcing your feed to someone else's algorithm, and avoiding that is supposed to be the point of RSS).

On some level, "I want to/am able to wade through the firehose" is a pre-req for RSS. I'm sure that's part of what limited the appeal even in the fabled golden age of Google Reader. Also, like most things, it's better if you pay for it. I've paid for two versions of Reeder now (about $15 total, I believe) and I pay Feedbin $50/year to act as my backend + web interface. The overall experience is better than any of the other modern RSS apps I've tried, and better than Reader was way back when.

[kjs3]

Isn't that a client issue, not an RSS issue per se? Accept a lot and have some rules to filter it? That's kinda what I like about RSS...I have the power to decide what ends up in my feeds, not what some algorithm decides I should see.

[trowawee]

Not really; definitionally an RSS feed is just a big list of everything a site publishes. Sure, the rules-based approach will work, and I assume anyone who's been using RSS for a while has built up a set of filter rules that amount to a personal algorithm for their feed. But it's a big initial investment in time and effort to set those rules up. If you subscribe to a bunch of personal blogs, you're fine. But if you sign up for, say, the NYT, the WSJ, and Bloomberg (not a crazy list) the day you set up an account on Feedbin, you'll have 200+ items by the end of the first day. Are you 100% sure you already knew every rule you want/need to filter those items? If not, are you a fast enough reader or willing to just mark as read and ignore stuff? I think a lot of people aren't, and social media has accustomed people to not thinking about stuff like this.

[vidarh]

It is absolutely a client issue. For a while (before their API limits became an issue), I dealt with Twitter with a Bayesian network, and it took very little training to massively improve the experience.